Politics

Wrong Man, Wrong Place

In the June 2005 article “Wrong Man, Wrong Place,” David Margolick and Richard Gooding investigated the possible conspiracy surrounding Jeff Gannon, a former male escort who, as a reporter for the obscure right-wing Web site Talon News, had somehow obtained daily White House press passes and was covering briefings by President George W. Bush. As Margolick and Gooding reported, Gannongate blew up after Gannon, whose real name is James D. Guckert, lobbed a softball question to the president at a press conference in January 2005: “How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?” he asked, referring to Senate Democratic leaders. Liberal bloggers became suspicious that the question had been planted (it was not, according to a polygraph test administered to Gannon on the reality TV show Lie Detector) and started digging into Gannon’s past. It didn’t take long before Web sites linking Gannon to a gay-male-escort service—a surprising turn of events, given Gannon’s history of anti-gay reporting—were unearthed. Suddenly, Gannon became radioactive. He resigned from Talon News, and then Talon News disappeared altogether—and, by and large, so did Gannon.

When Margolick and Gooding last spoke with him, Gannon said he saw a comeback in his future, perhaps in the form of a book or a talk show. While it turns out that Gannon did write a book, The Great Media War, published in 2007, it wasn’t the explosive tell-all he had probably envisioned.

Gannon did a short stint as a columnist for the Washington Blade, a gay-and-lesbian newspaper, from July 2005 to September 2006, and, in 2006, he became a member of the National Press Corps. That same year Gannon outed himself.

Until recently Gannon mostly maintained jeffgannon.com, his personal blog, where he accepted contributions via PayPal. The site shut down within the last few months. But with everything that happened during the 2008 election, we are surprised Gannon didn’t become more visible. After all, we couldn’t help but notice similarities between Gannon and Joe the Plumber: not only were both skewered by the blogosphere, but they look alike too.